Oxygen & Deforestation
‘Have you ever wondered what a world without trees would look like? Close your eyes, and try to imagine a desolate Earth.’
Deforestation is the removal of trees from the land by man-made and natural events. Each year, 115 to 150 million square kilometers of forest are lost due to deforestation. According to the World Bank between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 1.3 million square kilometers of forest.
The tropical forests are the richest habitat on earth. Exactly how many species rain forests contain is unknown, but it runs into millions. And new ones are discovered every week. Although they cover just seven percent of the world’s land area, jungles play a vital role in the health of the planet. Tropical rain forests produce 40% of the Earth’s oxygen. In the last 40 years we have lost 50% of all rain forests and over time we have lost half of all forests globally. Deforestation is mainly caused by agriculture (80%), logging (14%), and firewood (5%).
Forests cover 31% of the land area on our planet. Because of them, people are able to thrive and survive since they provide oxygen, purify the water and the air we breath. But there is much more, many animals and ecosystems also rely on forests. Forests are home to 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. These ecosystems are complex webs of organisms that include plants, animals, fungi and bacteria.
What Is Deforestation?
Deforestation is the clearing, destroying, or otherwise removal of trees through deliberate, natural or accidental means. It can occur in any area densely populated by trees and other plant life, but the majority of it is currently happening in the Amazon rainforest.
Deforestation occurs for a number of reasons, including: farming, mostly cattle due to its quick turn around; and logging, for materials and development. It has been happening for thousands of years, arguably since man began converting from hunter/gatherer to agricultural based societies, and required larger, unobstructed tracks of land to accommodate cattle, crops, and housing.
The destruction of forests, trees and other vegetation can cause climate change, desertification, soil erosion, fewer crops, flooding, increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and a host of problems for indigenous people.
One of the main cause of deforestation is agriculture and the main cause of forest degradation is illegal logging. We’re losing 18.7 million acres of forests annually, equivalent to 27 soccer fields every minute.
The destruction of the tropical rain forests alone is cause severe problems. These rain forests are home to much of the world’s biodiversity. In the Amazon alone, around 17% of the forest has been lost in half a century, and mostly due to animal agriculture.
The Amazon Rainforest covers approximately 2% of the planet, but it generates almost 20% of our oxygen, hence its designation as the lungs of the Earth.
According to statistics, about half of the world’s tropical forests have been cleared. Annually, 6 to 12% of global forests are lost. Since the last century, Indonesia lost at least 15.79 million hectares of forests, making it the country with the most deforestation. Some other deforested countries include Thailand, Brazil, and some parts of Africa and Europe.
Rainforests
Congo
The planet’s youngest rainforest lies in Congo, a mere 18.000 years old. It’s the jungle with more big animals than any other. Jungles may look the same, but each is home to a unique cast of characters.
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world’s largest jungle-covered island, and more than half of its plants and animals are found nowhere else on Earth.
New Guinea’s isolation has created a unique variety of animals, but the age of a forest has even greater impact on the diversity of life it contains.
Borneo
The jungles of Borneo, in Southeast Asia, have grown here for nearly 130 million years, making them the oldest on Earth.
Here in just a few hectares of forest there may be more kinds of plants than in the whole of Europe, including some of the most specialized on Earth. There are 39 kinds of pitcher plants in Borneo, and most are found nowhere else.
Relationships like these have taken millions of year to evolve, but many could be gone in a decade. In the last 50 years Borneo has lost over half of its jungle. And it’s even worse on the neighbouring islands of the Philippines. Here, 90% of the primary rain forest has gone.
In the swamp forests of northern Sumatra, in Indonesia, time is running out for one of our closest ancestors. The orangutan. A baby orangutan takes more than ten years to become independent. Everything must be learned from it’s mother. Survival depends on each orang understanding its patch of forest perfectly. Like all orangutans, they have a mental map of their surroundings, including the location of every fruiting tree. This long education has made orangutans particularly vulnerable to changes taking place in their forest. It’s now estimated that we lose 100 orangutans every week from human activity. In the last four decades, the pristine lowland jungle that orangutans depend on has declined by a staggering 75 percent.
Footage released by International Animal Rescue, shows harrowing footage of an orangutan trying to fight off a bulldozer destroying its habitat. As loggers smash the base of a tree in the Ketapang.
The Amazon
The Amazon basin is over 3000 kilometers across and home to half of our planet’s remaining rain forest. In the Amazon salt licks are as vital as an oasis in a desert.
Here, every animal group has more species than everywhere else. And that includes frogs. There thought to be over a thousand different kinds of them here, and new ones are still being discovered. Frogs are an indicator of a healthy forest, but its most important residents are the jungle’s smallest inhabitants. There are thought to be over two million kinds of insects in the Amazon. But there is an enemy of the insects, a parasitic fungus, Cordyceps. The more numerous a species is, the more likely it is to fall victim to the killer fungus. Checks and balances like these means no one species can ever dominate, so protecting the jungle’s incredible diversity.
But today the diversity of the world’s rainforests, is falling at an alarming rate, and that is because of us. We have now replaced up to 27 million hectares of virgin jungle with a single species of tree. Oil palm, one of the world’s most productive crops. These monocultures support only a fraction the diversity found in primary rain forests, and it is pushing many animals to extinction.
Across the world we are losing tropical forest at the rate of nearly 15 million hectares every year, and with it, the planet’s treasure trove of diversity. Jungles store and capture more carbon than any other habitat on land. They cool our planet, provide food and medicines. We lose them at our peril.
Deforestation in The Netherlands
The upcoming plans for The Netherlands with deforestation are not looking good, as 1231 hectares will be logged and only 304 hectares will be newly planted. There is a lot of worry about deforestation as an insane increase of logging is happening for bio-gas, “sick” trees, urbanization and 5G internet installations.
According to a study of Wageningen University, our forests have declined with 5400 hectares between 2013 and 2017. They replaced these forests with different types of nature, such as heather and drift-sand. For habitats like this European law counts, stating that each felled tree needs to be compensated, except when it’s replaced for different nature. In this case, all of these felled trees have not been compensated at all.
Luckily due to the lawsuit that Natuur & Milieu won in court against the state in its responsibility to reduce CO2, we have something to hold on to as citizens! This agreement also means that we cannot slaughter our forests, as they reduce and store CO2.
Causes of deforestation
Farming, grazing of livestock, mining, and drilling combined account for more than half of all deforestation. Forestry practices, wildfires and, in small part, urbanization account for the rest.
In places such as Malaysia and Indonesia, huge amount of forests are being destroyed in order to make way for planting and producing palm oil, which can be found in everything from shampoo to saltines.
In the Amazon, cattle ranching and farms—particularly soy plantations—are key culprits.
Logging operations, which provide the world’s wood and paper products, also are responsible for cutting thousand of trees each year. Forests are also cut as a result of growing urban sprawl as land is developed for homes.
Rainforests provide us with more than just trees; we rely on them for much more than we realize. So what would a world without rainforests look like?
Less Oxygen Produced
Oxygen comprises only about 21 percent of air's chemical component. Yet, it is extremely important to life on earth. Living organisms, from single-celled animals to humans, use oxygen to produce the energy required to sustain them. Since trees are considered larger plants, their production of oxygen is much more significant. It is estimated that tropical rain forests, produce 40 percent of the earth's oxygen even though they cover only about 6 percent of the land. Rain forests in the Amazon have declined by 17 percent in the last 50 years as a result of deforestation.
Oxygen Problems
Without trees, humans would not be able survive because the air would be unsuitable for breathing. If anything, without oxygen, we will have to develop some kind of gas masks that will be able to filter the little oxygen that would be left in the air.
Due to deforestation there are fewer trees to "clean" the air.
Trees and plants, in general, produce energy for growth using a process known as photosynthesis. Using light, water and carbon dioxide, a plant produces energy in the form of sugar and releases oxygen into the air.
Deforestation, as well as a rise in the emissions and our global temperature, affects the air that we breathe. This is because all trees take in carbon dioxide and other pollutants which are known to cause a lot of problems in the atmosphere and to us, humans. This inevitably results in all of us breathing dirtier and more polluted air that we otherwise wouldn’t.
Long-term exposure to polluted air can have permanent health effects such as: Accelerated aging of the lungs. Loss of lung capacity and decreased lung function. Development of diseases such as asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, and possibly cancer.
"A forest is much more than what you see," says ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her 30 years of research in Canadian forests have led to an astounding discovery - trees talk, often and over vast distances. Learn more about the harmonious yet complicated social lives of trees and prepare to see the natural world with new eyes.
How would deforestation affect the global environment?
Trees have an important role regarding regulating the carbon cycle, which is a global process in which carbon dioxide constantly circulates through the atmosphere into organisms and back again. Carbon, after water, is the second most important element for our ecosystem.
Trees are responsible for taking the carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis in order to make energy. This carbon is then either transferred into oxygen and released into the air by respiration or is stored inside the trees until they decompose into the soil. Therefore, the absence of trees would result in significantly higher amounts of carbon dioxide in the air and lower amounts of oxygen! This bad quality air would also be full of airborne particles and pollutants like carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
In addition to the decrease of oxygen in the atmosphere, it would allow excessive amounts of carbon dioxide to remain. In the short term, since CO2 is one of the major greenhouse gases, it will undoubtedly lead to higher global temperatures which, in turn, would quicken the melting of the polar ice caps.
Measurements of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane released from Amazonian soils show that tropical deforestation accelerates the greenhouse problem. The global importance of tropical forest soils in the atmospheric carbon cycle and its susceptibility to alteration by human land-management practices implies that the solution to the human-induced climate change problem lies in a combination of combustion source controls, conservation of existing tropical rain forests, and large-scale upgrading of productivity on currently degraded tropical soils.
Support Reforestation Projects
Ecosia:
Ecosia is a search engine like Google, but very different: they use our ad revenue to plant trees where nature and people need them most. The Ecosia community has already planted millions of trees in Ethiopia, Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, as well as many other biodiversity hotspots.
Eden Reforestation Projects
Eden Reforestation projects reduces extreme poverty and restores healthy forests by employing local villagers to plant millions of trees every year. Learn more about the work being done and how you can help.
Tree Nation
https://tree-nation.com/projects
This website offers a huge list of active projects that focus on reforestation and you can support. Discover the projects where you can start planting now.
We Forest
https://www.weforest.org/page/why-it-matters
WeForest works with communities, local organisations and NGOs to develop scalable reforestation projects, demonstrating how it is possible to mobilise communities and restore our degraded soils. WeForest, backed by a scientific network, is growing a movement of small and large responsible companies committed to having a positive impact for people and for our planet.
Reforestation World
https://www.reforestationworld.org/our-projects
Discover the work being done around the world to restore forest ecosystems and improve the livelihoods of people that depend on them.
‘What could be more important than having air to breathe?’
Benefits of reducing deforestation
Tropical forests need to be protected from deforestation and degradation if we want to reduce emissions to the levels needed to protect the planet against the worst global warming impacts and also to have clean air to breathe. Ending deforestation will not solve global warming by itself, but urgent action is needed and the problem cannot be solved if tropical deforestation is ignored.
Reducing deforestation is not only a beneficial action against global warming—it also can make important contributions to saving biodiversity and supporting sustainable development.
Deforestation solutions
On the good side, tropical deforestation can decrease —and, in many places, actions are taken in order to tackle the problem. A variety of approaches, from corporate deforestation-free commitments to the REDD+ initiative to the Soy Moratorium, have shown promising results. Continuing progress will require a sustained commitment by governments, businesses, consumers, and non-governmental organizations to the goal of ending—and, where possible, reversing—tropical deforestation.
Law and Regulations
Due to the nature and extent of forest destruction, efforts to stop the human activities can be complemented by laws and regulation at governmental and organizational levels. The more people becoming more aware of deforestation consequences, the more there is pressure on the government to tackle the problem.
Educative Campaigns
Deforestation can also be counteracted by bringing more awareness through educative campaigns in schools and universities. With this, young people can learn all about the causes, effects, and ways of counteracting deforestation. Personal experiences from adversely affected communities such as farmers can be used to emphasize the negative effects of deforestation.
Promoting Sustainable Choices
Individuals can make a difference in the fight to save forests by making informed daily choices. By using less stuff, eating sustainable food, and choosing recycled or certified sustainable wood products, we can all be part of the movement towards zero deforestation.
Eat Less Meat
Agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation. This one’s hard for some people and may actually be dangerous but even having a meatless Monday or only eating meat for one meal a day will make a big impact on the environment.
Reduce Paper Consumption
Opt for recycled paper products, including printing paper, notebooks, napkins, toilet paper, etc. Simple habits to try are printing/writing on both sides of the paper, using less toilet paper, avoiding paper plates and napkins.
Reforestation Projects
There are a lot of efforts happening around the world in order to restore forests and the largest ever tropical reforestation is planting 73 Million trees. The project in the Brazilian Amazon is using a new technique for planting trees that results in more, stronger plants–and hopes to cover around 29.000 hectares in new forests.
The Conscious Challenge
A better world starts with yourself, join #theconsciouschallenge and make an impact in your city!
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